Compressive Coded Antennas (CCAs) and Compressive Coded Meta Antennas (CCMAs) are recently-developed types of radiating elements. It has been shown that complementary-electric-inductor-capacitor (cELC) meta-materials can be used in a waveguide antenna to create a CCMA having multidimensional codification. Such systems have achieved quasi-real-time two dimensional (2D) imaging using a single transceiver and no phase shifters.
Despite the enhanced performance of such systems, however, several limitations exist with a waveguide-based CCMA. The multidimensional codes are fixed and cannot be changed once the waveguide-based CCMA has been designed and fabricated. Also, the resonance of the cELC meta-material is the only degree of freedom available to design the codification. Further, there is not a clear figure of merit that can be used to assess the performance of the CCMA system.